Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
Stuart A. Kauffman
2008, Basic BooksThere are some books that do not fade after the first encounter. They do not let go of the mind, instead re-surfacing again and again, because they communicate something fundamental, something vital, with the potential to change an entire worldview. Stuart Kauffman’s “Reinventing the Sacred” is one of those books, rarely-encountered, that collects a plethora of profound wisdom into one powerful read. This new work from a preeminent complexity theorist contains not only fluid prose but also important insights into physics, biology, human nature, economics, and culture, with serious implications for our changing world and our personal lives.
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Reinventing the Sacred - Stuart Kauffman
Posted: August 25th, 2008, 8:37am PDT by paulbhartzog
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Representation and the World
Posted: May 13th, 2008, 6:50pm PDT by paulbhartzog
Representations matter. In my own work, I have lectured about the importance of having a plurality of representations to gain a better understanding of relationships in what is being represented. Hierarchies or networks are not "there" but are a function of a particular representation that utilizes pre-chosen criteria of value.
Maps of the world are a great example.
I happen to like the Gall-Peters projection:
"The Gall-Peters achieved considerable notoriety in the late 20th century as the centerpiece of a controversy surrounding the political implications of map design."
Recently one of my complex systems colleagues here at the University of Michigan, Mark Newman, has created some very interesting "cartograms" by varying the criteria upon which the representation is based, using a typical map of the world.
"It's possible, however, and sometimes very useful, to redraw the map with the sizes of countries made bigger or smaller in order to represent something of interest. Such maps are called cartograms and can be an effective and natural way of portraying geographic or social data."
In addition:
"Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. There are now nearly 600 maps."
In fact, now that I think about, the tagline in my email signature is "See differently, then you will act differently." That about says it. :-)
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Jonathan Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It)"
Posted: May 12th, 2008, 6:54pm PDT by paulbhartzog
Jonathan Zittrain's new book "The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It)" is now online.
The Future of the Internet explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet—its “generativity,” or innovative character—is at risk.
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Global Map of Digital Inclusion
Posted: May 12th, 2008, 11:00am PDT by paulbhartzog
A nicely interactive map of digital access:
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IFTF "Future of Making" Map
Posted: May 9th, 2008, 11:23am PDT by paulbhartzog
Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences—the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc. These trends sit atop a platform of grassroots economics—new market structures developing online that embody a shift from stores and sales to communities and connections.
Download PDF:
"Future of Making" Map [SR-1154] http://www.iftf.org/system/files/deliverables/SR-1154+TH+2008+Maker+Map....IFTF Post:
http://iftf.org/node/1766 -
Situated Technologies Pamphlets 1: Urban Computing and its Discontents
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 11:14am PDT by paulbhartzog
Situated Technologies Pamphlets 1: Urban Computing and its Discontentsby
Adam Greenfield
Mark ShepardThe Situated Technologies Pamphlet series explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How is our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics, and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and what do technologists need to know about cities? Situated Technologies Pamphlets will be published in nine issues and will be edited by a rotating list of leading researchers and practitioners from architecture, art, philosophy of technology, comparative media study, performance studies, and engineering.
free download @ http://www.lulu.com/content/1554599
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Everything Must Change
Posted: April 11th, 2008, 8:45pm PDT by paulbhartzog
Alex Steffen has a great post over at http://www.worldchanging.org on "Neighborliness, Innovation and Sustainability." He makes such an important point that it is worth quoting at length:
I call this idea "the Swap." It's sort of a middle stage on the road to a better future, where people have accepted that something must change, but have not really gotten their heads around the idea that everything must change. Therefore, the Swap is a form of denial.
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Cosma Orsi Interviews Michel Bauwens
Posted: April 11th, 2008, 8:15pm PDT by paulbhartzog
Michel Bauwens definitely has a way with words, and from time to time you find pieces like this one in which he summarizes a number of salient theoretical insights into peer-to-peer society (network culture):
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/interview-on-peer-to-peer-politics-with-co...
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A Plurality of Works
Posted: April 11th, 2008, 6:00pm PDT by paulbhartzog
An excellent post from the ever-thoughtful Bill Tozier revolving around the point that "there can be no selective archive":
Somehow the myths of The Book, of The Editor, the Archive, and even the Authoritative Word, they’ve eaten our ability to hold flexible and contingent opinions. So few of us wonder which book we have in our hands; which edition, which version, which printing, which copy?
http://williamtozier.com/slurry/2008/04/06/why-i-feel-so-strongly-about-...
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Differencing
Posted: April 7th, 2008, 11:19am PDT by paulbhartzog
Well I've started working on my Ph.D. exam, targeted for some time over the summer. My topic is something I'm calling "differencing" which is a distinction-making process.
Basically, any act of making a distinction, such as drawing a circle, creates an inside and an outside at the same moment. Inside, outside, and the distinction itself, are all mutually constituted.
As near as I can figure, differencing must involve three separate processes:
- emergence
- autopoiesis
- integration
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Wikiworld: Political Economy and the Promise of Participatory Media
Posted: March 19th, 2008, 9:07am PDT by paulbhartzog
Colleague, researcher, and great guy Tere Vadén (with Juha Suoranta) have new work available:
WIKIWORLD
Political Economy and the Promise of Participatory MediaJuha Suoranta & Tere Vadén
University of Tampere, Finland -
Fear of Small Numbers
Posted: March 17th, 2008, 6:58am PDT by paulbhartzog
Recently, I absorbed Arjun Appadurai's little book "Fear of Small Numbers" (http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3863-7) which he frames as a deliberate contrast to the "Huntington model" from Clash of Civilizations.
There are some good concepts in here:
1. The notion of "predatory identities" which is to say identities that cannot exist without eliminating other identities. I would extend this concept to "parasitic identities" as well, with obvious implications.
2. The idea that the respect of minority groups in liberalism has always been tied to the fear of "dissent" and not the respect for difference.
3. The need for a shift in thinking from the "clash of civilizations" (Huntington) to a "civilization of clashes." I think this has important and useful implications related to agonism in general.
It dovetails nicely with Laclau and Mouffe's articulations in "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy," as well as Hardt and Negri's "Multitude."
It's pretty clear he's talking about panarchy:
"The new transnational activisms... build their actual solidarities in a more ad hoc, inductive and context-sensitive manner.... coordinating without massive centralization, reproducing without a clear-cut mandate, working occasionally in the larger public eye but often outside it, leveraging resources from state and market to their own ends, and pursuing visions of equity an daccess that do not fit many twentieth century models either of development or of democracy." (p136-7)
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Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Extortion through Systems Disruption
Posted: March 11th, 2008, 8:53am PDT by paulbhartzog
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Novelty and collective attention -- Wu and Huberman
Posted: March 11th, 2008, 8:22am PDT by paulbhartzog
Novelty and collective attention
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
The subject of collective attention is central to an information age where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades.
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Purse Lip Square Jaw: Representing the political agency of technological devices
Posted: March 4th, 2008, 9:09pm PST by paulbhartzog
The "pan" in panarchy is not anthropomorphic. Thinking panarchically means recognizing the political relations of all entities and environments, their overlaps, their mutual exclusions, their interpenetrations....
A great Peruvian archaeologist once told me that Western scholars always misunderstand the sun in Inka culture. Inti, he explained, has a face not because the Inka anthropomorphised him but because the Europeans had no words to describe humans and non-humans as if they were the same.
Purse Lip Square Jaw: Representing the political agency of technological devices
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Kevin Kelly "gets" P2P Economics
Posted: March 4th, 2008, 8:14pm PST by paulbhartzog
The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.
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New Mobilities: Ce-more about what's happening in the mobile world: Are we shifting towards a psycho–civilised society?
Posted: March 4th, 2008, 8:06pm PST by paulbhartzog
Internet journal First Monday has just published a new paper by Kingsley Dennis that takes a look at the possible detrimental effects of wireless technologies; especially how they might affect neuronal functions - in military, industrial, and social terms.
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Notional Slurry » There are exactly two ways: one, and many
Posted: March 3rd, 2008, 7:03am PST by paulbhartzog
There are two ways to succeed in the complicated, burdensome flowless interrupting world we’ve made. Two ways to Get Things Done; anybody telling you there’s only one is selling something. Two ways to satisfice and maybe even to excel.
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Arendt, Connectivity, and Transformation
Posted: March 1st, 2008, 10:58am PST by paulbhartzog
I am working on a paper about Hannah Arendt and it reminded me that I was going to blog a brief realization....
First we have Arendt's point that the political emerges whenever people come together to begin something new in the world.
Second, we have Reed's Law which says the value of group-forming-networks scales NOT as n^2, i.e. as each new member enters the network, but rather as 2^n because we are interested in the number of new groups made possible by the new member's presence.
Third, we have the obvious fact of global technological connectivity in general, i.e. what Howard Rheingold calls "technologies of cooperation." For example, there is the recently announced fact that the cell-phone is the fastest spreading technology in the history of the world, because it basically does the one thing humanity is based on, which is make possible human coming together.
Fourth, complex systems shows us that highly interconnected systems cross transformational thresholds, called phase shifts, where they suddenly reconfigure into some new form.
If we accept Arendt, and we apply Reed's Law to the world around us, then we can only conclude that we are in the midst of an explosion in the realm of political activity (and social/economic, if you feel a need to separate those out).
Then the key question now is: is there any way we can tell what the threshold is? And what would we do if we knew it?
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Panarchy Etymology and Usage
Posted: November 28th, 2007, 6:47pm PST by paulbhartzog
There are a number of relevant uses of the word "panarchy" in recent scholarship.
"Panarchy means an inclusive, universal system of
Mark Salter offers this definition:
governance in which all may participate meaningfully" (Sewell and
Salter, 1995).
"Panarchy" is a play on words that suggests many of the concepts
inherent in panarchy. For example, "pan-" means "all," "whole,"
"global." Panarchy, then, would be an all-encompassing system.
"Pan" was also a Greek nature deity. Mark Salter, one of the co-coiners of the word, remarks -
Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Habermas blows off question about the Internet and the Public Sphere
Posted: November 28th, 2007, 3:09pm PST by paulbhartzog
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Panarchy Work in the Works (finally?)
Posted: November 26th, 2007, 9:24am PST by paulbhartzog
Well, it looks like I will finally be getting moving on my panarchy dissertation. It may just turn into a paper, depending on the graduation options I have available. I'll let you know. :-)
-p
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Panarchy "Social Publishing" talks coming up
Posted: October 10th, 2007, 6:20am PDT by paulbhartzog
Richard Adler and I will be giving some talks on "social publishing" as an example of panarchy:
Oct 15, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; Colloquium on New Commons
"Social Publishing"
This talk will focus on how social publishing is an example of a new kind of publishing commons where writers and readers (and potentially editors) act as depletable resources for each other.
http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/colloquia_lectures.html -
Panarchy Books on LibraryThing
Posted: March 24th, 2007, 7:24pm PDT by paulbhartzog
For a project I am doing I have created a library for "panarchy" on LibraryThing.com. You can see an evolving list of panarchy books here:
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Panarchy in Action
Posted: March 4th, 2007, 6:32am PST by paulbhartzog
It occurred to me that visitors and scholars might benefit from an ongoing list of panarchy examples, so here goes.
Panarchy is in action when groups of people perform collective action in parallel to or in spite of hierarchical organizations. Panarchy is in action when:
- global social networks and movements act on behalf of some cause, from land mines to environmentalism to anti-war protests.
- people share URLs and tags on social bookmarking sites like http://del.icio.us.
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Time and governance
Posted: March 4th, 2007, 4:14am PST by Kingsley
Online journal 'Re-public' - http://www.re-public.gr/en/ - has a special issue on Time & Governance:
'Time has been for too long a relatively “hidden” concept in mainstream discussions about politics, more often presupposed rather than clearly articulated. With the advent of globalization studies, time has emerged as a central focal point of contemporary social and political transformations. “Time and governance” explores the multiple intersections between time and politics in the attempt to rethink democratic theory and practice.'
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Kristóf Nyíri - Collective Thinking
Posted: February 24th, 2007, 3:24am PST by Kingsley
Kristóf Nyíri is currently Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has been working with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on conducting an interdisciplinary social science research program on communications in the 21st century.
In a recent short paper titled 'Collective Thinking' he wrote that:
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Digital neighbourhood watch plan
Posted: February 20th, 2007, 8:58am PST by Kingsley
Although much has already been researched on disaster management, this project aims to capitalise on the power of distributed social networks, with the idea that people can work as social objects. This seemed like something close to grassroots panarchy:
BBC News in their post 'Digital neighbourhood watch plan' - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6364301.stm - discuss how a concept for a neighbourhood watch for the digital age could use the power of social networking, especially in emergency reaction and planning:
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Peer Governance and the State, part 2
Posted: February 18th, 2007, 8:25pm PST by michel
This is the second part of our inquiry into the relationship between peer governance and the state and representative forms. Today, we focus on: what needs to be done.
What do our previous conclusions mean for the emancipatory traditions that emerged from the industrial era?
I believe it could have 2 positive effects:
1) a dissociation of the automatic link with bureaucratic government modalities (which does not mean that it is not appropriate in certain circumstances); proposals can be formulated which directly support the development of the Commons
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Peer Governance and the State, part 1
Posted: February 18th, 2007, 7:38pm PST by michel
I'm always been very interested in Paul's ongoing investigations on panarchy, as the concept is very close to my own concept of peer governance, which we use at the P2P Foundation. To start of possible debate, I'm starting with a two-part summary of how I see peer governance to be related to representative democracy.
Michel Bauwens
Peer Governance and Democracy
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Terrorist Network Analysis
Posted: February 16th, 2007, 2:44pm PST by paulbhartzog
This is precisely the kind of sophisticated network analysis and conceptualization that needs to be applied to panarchy as a whole (and not merely to terrorist networks). It would be great to see this method widely used on criminal networks, global smart mobs, cell phones and mobility, etc.
The media term "amorphous terrorist network" doesn't provide much for us to work with. That changes when you apply advanced network theory to the topic.....
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P2P Foundation Panarchy Pages
Posted: February 8th, 2007, 8:01pm PST by paulbhartzog
The P2P Foundation has a category for panarchy in their wiki.